A large enough userbase to support more niche topics. On Lemmy, like a lot of small communities, people tend to put the cart before the horse. They make places to share content for very niche topics but there aren’t enough to warrant it. Plus sometimes you have mods in certain relatively niche groups that will remove content from their community because it is off topic, but their volume of posts is nowhere near enough for the occasional, technically off topic post to really matter. I see it in Discord servers too. Some places have more channels than users on the server. People get obsessed with categorization.
content
Content and the number of users. Good lord there are so many dead boards on lemmy.
Active communities. Some of the comms for my interests technically exist, in that they get one post every third month that gets 2 upvotes. Despite everything, these communities are still thriving on Reddit. Yet for whatever reason, any attempt to replicate them here fails. Smh
They were small on reddit once too. Just a matter of time. Also helps if you post to them.
I’m not sure that it is a matter of time. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic, but I think the fediverse wave has crested already. There’s a reverse migration from Mastodon back to places like X/Twitter under way, and lemmy really never even saw the scale of adoption or attention that Mastodon saw.
I’m not worried that lemmy will go away any time soon, but I’m not sure it’s ever going to be mainstream enough to attract enough users to really support vibrant and diverse communities.
Yes, unfortunately the multiple instance nature of Lemmy is an obstacle for most people. I’ve been here for more than a year and I still struggle to describe what Lemmy is.
I’m not sure that’s the problem. Maybe it is, but from what I see, most people never even get far enough into considering lemmy for its decentralized nature to become the blocker. I don’t think it really even registers as an option for most of them.
The big commercial sites would do things like research studies and marketing campaigns to try to attract new users. Fediverse mostly relies on organic growth, driven by things like word-of-mouth. That’s fine, in that it gives us a core group of users who really want to be here and know why, but I think there’s an upper bound to our ability to attract new users that way.
I’m sure some will prefer that it works this way, but for me, I consider users of Reddit and X/Twitter to be something along the lines of hostages needing to be rescued. We can’t save them all, but I’d love to get more people off of those sites.
Any amount of positivity and fun. Lemmy users just feel so miserable and argumentative.
I mean sign of the times but damn.
That’s interesting. I feel like my experience has been the opposite. I’ll occasionally post things here, completely expecting some negative response (not looking for it, but I know how people are). For example, I posted a rant about an issue I was having after switching to Linux. Instead of negativity, I typically get responses more like “that’s a valid criticism. Have you considered $x, though?”, and the conversation continues quite pleasantly.
I feel like reddit was far quicker to jump to “no. You’re wrong, and here’s why…”.
Edit: correcting hypothetical redditor’s spelling.
You were having an issue, not posting your opinion. What is there to be mad about? Also Linuxers will froth at any opportunity to do that.
oh yeah, either infinite Trumpa-lumpa or linux! so much linux! horrible!!
/s
The only time I’ve been dunked on is by tankies when said that RT is pure propaganda.
Otherwise I like vibes here…sometimes the super hard line against Libs and Obama throw me off but an anarchy-socialist so it doesn’t bother me personally. Just a bit confusing when looking at the alternatives at the time.
Honestly yeah. I stuck with Lemmy for 3 years before caving and going back to Reddit because I was sick and tired of every single conversation no matter how unrelated circling back to Trumpa-lumpa.
Not to say Reddit isn’t its own flavor of horrible. It’s banking hard on social media addiction with all those post analytics and reminders to repost and boost engagement. Not to mention the fake AI users. Yuck.
I still sometimes steer people here because I still believe in a decentralized non corporate online space, it just needs to get past the self-selecting echo chamber phase. Once /c/mildlyinteresting isn’t 90% doomer news articles I’ll consider things a success.
What Reddit does have is niches. There’s a sub for dogs, then there’s a sub for labradors, and then there’s a sub each for yellow, black, and chocolate labs. All of them are lively and active and most importantly on-topic.
Reddit is basically facebook at this point.
Edit: this isn’t even really true. I just wanted to say something bad about reddit because they banned me for life for saying that Alex Karp should be yeeted into space and that Donald Trump rapes kids.
I miss being able to make sarcastic comments without someone telling me I’m the sole reason the world went to shit.
could be worse, you could live in a place where people are like that in person.
More users in smaller niche communities. Lemmy has less users in general, so smaller niche communities are practically non-existent here.
I don’t can enough to post enough in there canning, but I’m hoping it’s just well, we’re all waiting for fall and the harvests!
Support from Nebula creators.
Nebula doesn’t have its own comment system, so it’s up to the individual creator where, if at all, they engage their viewers. Most if not all I’ve seen mentions reddit. Some may be on Bluesky too, but as far as I’m concerned Bluesky is just another proprietary platform that can turn into a monetization driven project.
I really want to participate in the jetlag discussions, but I don’t want to log into my reddit accounts ever again. So I’m left with the nebula community here, which is better than nothing, but we’re like 5 accounts that participate monthly.
This might be something to write to your favourite creators about. They want know if it isn’t brought to their attention, and I would certainly enjoy it too. Change takes time, but also effort by the early adopters.
Yeah, problem is I have no other way of contacting them than reddit, and I’m pretty sure my message will get auto-deleted and my account permabanned for trying. I don’t care about the account, but a 10year old account with +80k karma does have some credibility, if I have to use that someday.
the niche communities over there, replicated here, but without the number of users some are ghost towns on lemmy. with them forcing popup logins piecemeal, we may get a boost.
also people scattered way too much to other similar platforms, when one instance shutsdown which is problematic.
also some politically heavy instances ban like they would on reddit.
More apolitical communities
Agreeing with you here.
Visit popular on reddit and posts will be like:
- cat pic
- pic of food and girl complaining
- video of fight
- meme about work
- mandami
- ice bullshit
- dog pic
- kids are fucking stupid
- cat pic
- PG video of something funny
- pic of food of girl complaining
- cat pic
- Trump
- picture of celebs boobs
- cat pic
Popular is based on you. So that’s a personal list and problem… r/All still works for me that’s where it’s not based on you.
I don’t have a reddit account anymore. This is me as a non logged in user.
Otherwise, it’ll just be 30 posts about shitposts, and then one post about pie.
90% of the answers in here boil down to more users.
active users specifically
Searching my username + lemmy in the search bar equals every instance except my own for +90% of searches :p
Easy way to look at the context of a reply.
More users. The scalability to accommodate more users.
Other than that, Lemmy pretty much has everything.
more users but not more bots like redbot
Shareholder value! JK Reddit doesn’t have that either. Zing!
Ability to turn off inbox replies from comments.
Agree that would be nice, though I’m happy Lemmy doesn’t hound you every time you get an upvote or urge you to repost. Here at least every reply is from a person.
on piefed, you can do this for every comment. there is a little bell on the bottom right of the comment (in the web ui) which let’s you turn notifications on/off
E: also, interstellar has this in the 3 dots menu on the comment
Same, seems like a basic thing to block the noise.
IMO it directly contributes to the perceived argumentativeness of lemmy. Comments feel a lot more personal and direct when presented in an inbox vs on the actual thread.
On reddit I turned off replies for everything except the times I was wanting a reply.
Larger active sports communities. There’s a subreddit for every sport you want to follow, and even for each team. So you can get detailed news specifically for your team, go to game threads for real time discussion for any live game and even go lurk your rival team’s subreddit to enjoy all the complaining after your team beats them. All of that only works with a large active user base and Lemmy just isn’t there yet.
